A Much-Delayed Project

While reading Happier At Home by Gretchen Rubin I decided I wanted to do more to get some pictures on our walls. I am notoriously bad about leaving my walls bare because I can't decide what I want to put on them and would rather have them bare than have something I don't really care for on them. Eric would rather have something on them than have bare walls, so for the most part the things hung in my home were hung by Eric with the wave of my hand and the "Yeah, I guess," as a go-ahead.

I decided right away that I wanted a "travel wall." I went to great effort to go through our numerous digital photos from our many trips over the past eight years. I wanted to choose photos from pretty much every place we've traveled while at the same time only putting up decent photos. (One challenge with this is that Eric is a much better photographer than I am, so there are many more good pictures of me than there are of him.)

I also knew I wanted a family photo wall with pictures spanning a reasonable amount of time - not just our most recent family shoot (which happens to be when I was barely pregnant with Felix).

I wanted both walls to be pretty easy to update, either by adding more photos and frames, or by simply switching out old photos with new ones. And I wanted this to be done very cheaply.

I printed my pictures at the drug store one of the times they sent a coupon code, which they do about once a week. I bought my frames at Dollar Tree, because everything there is a dollar. With as many pictures as I'd printed, even spending $3-$5 per picture would add up way too quickly.

I bought these frames in mid-June. I filled them with pictures right away. And then they hung out on my kitchen counter for a while. And then they moved to my dresser. And finally on Saturday I got Eric to help me hang them. It's a good thing I didn't do it myself, too, because he figured out very quickly that my original plan for hanging the travel wall pictures over the stairs was not a good one. He remedied it, and the overall effect is nice. We can easily add more pictures as we add more traveling adventures (which we fully intend to do since Eric has so much vacation time now). I love to walk past and see pictures of our different trips. (It was hard to get a good angle on this. Sorry for the lousy picture.)

While Eric finished up the hanging of the pictures on the travel wall, I went ahead with the family wall. Unfortunately I didn't plan the pictures perfectly, so I need to do some tweaking with the sizes, but for now it's fine. I'm just glad to have more than one picture on this rather large wall in my entry.